1. The story mentions that the service “may be more expensive than the use of an open source equivalent in the long run”. This is a free of cost service and the question of being more expensive does not arise.

2. The story also mentions “…Microsoft Office 365, a productivity suite, which has little to do with the functioning of the cloud-storage service”. Microsoft Office 365 is a cloud service and is rendered off the cloud. It’s a productivity and collaboration enhancing offering and comes with free storage on the cloud. The statement mentioned in the quotes is inaccurate.

3. The story also mentions “Open source requires no initial investment, with many vendors offering support and maintenance at half the price charged by proprietary software vendors”. The details of the SKU offered as a part of the AICTE agreement will clarify this.

Anuj Srivas and Vasudevan Mukunth reply:

An attempt to reach Microsoft was sought before the story was released. That said, the question of support and maintenance costs are not completely addressed. If the support is taken care of by Microsoft, the question then remains for how long?

There is no way to understand how expensive or cheap this may turn out to be, as we don’t know for how long Microsoft will provide support. Another equally important point is the constant update cycle that the software will require. The costs of ensuring constant updates to make sure it remains compatible are an unknown cost.

Secondly, if these cloud offerings were installed on Mac OS X or any form of Linux - the support and maintenance required for this could possibly be more time-consuming and expensive. It is unclear whether Office 365 runs properly on any Linux distribution. The reason the word ‘may’ was used in our story was because no precise calculation can be made without taking into account support costs.

Lastly, the initial cloud-based offering mentioned in the contract is Live@edu, which offers e-mail, web apps, instant messaging and storage. Office 365, which contains a number of business offerings too, is primarily a word processing software that runs off the cloud and thus is not an essential part of the initial offering.

The point the writer of this story is trying to make is that Microsoft's offering is a packaged software which the students can use to develop applications. Most of the top-end research in IT goes into developing such packaged software and not on building applications using packaged software. No one runs business critical applications on Open source. Open Source enables students to get exposure to the nuances of developing such packaged software. Companies that invest in developing packaged software such as windows and android have reaped significant returns. Very few companies in India invest in developing such software because of a lack of talent. Engineering education (with this pact with MS) will prevent students from gaining the required knowledge and skills to be employed for research. Cost-wise they will be unable to compete with Arts/Science graduates for BPO/IT support services jobs. Finally, we'll have a lot of engineers who cannot be employed.

from:
Solomon

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 10:41 IST

I am disappointed with this reporting. When you take on a subject with which you are not fully conversant you either leave it or access assistance from someone who knows. This kind of reporting does damage to an otherwise decent reputation.

from:
Hilary Pais

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 09:37 IST

I agree with Akshayjit, the authors- Anuj and Vasudevan probably never used MS Office 365, or for that matter any cloud based applications. I guess the authors are not from technical background. MS Office 365 just needs a browser and internet connectivity, just like Facebook or Gmail you can use on most browsers, so there is no question of "installing" in Mac OS or Linux or even Ubuntu..This again shows the author's poor knowledge on cloud systems. The last point mentioned by author says Live@edu offer contains email, "web apps", storage, they need to understand that "web apps" means - MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Excel etc and it is wrong to say that MS Office 365 is primarily a word processing!! Note: I'm not Microsoft employee or shareholder!

from:
Vivek

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 09:34 IST

The key is compatible browser...Office 365 would run flawless only in IE. Any other browser..would be a disaster. This is a client side requirement. Also another requirement would be skylight...which needs skylight runtime to be deployed.. By the way...it is easy if we have MS operating system instead of Linux....now you see the real benefit of Office 365 ...it will force you to use Windows 365 days a year....

from:
Srinivas

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 09:20 IST

I guess the authors want to gain some fame by fighting the big Microsoft. If people adopt open source office productivity software, things will go the same way as the so-called home-grown Akash tablet. Wow, that would be great for India. Seems like this Microsoft deal is a fantastic one. Instead of commending it authors decided to get some fame by writing an article like this with an attention getting title "...locked into..." as though all the students in India have been given a sentence. Microsoft should have actually charged. Free does not get appreciated much. The least that can be done is to be thankful. Microsoft is a profit-oriented company for sure but one need not bash it unfairly.

from:
Ram S

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 05:02 IST

I just wanted to add that I am not affiliated with Microsoft and couldn't care less about them. But these articles saying Open Source Software (OSS) can replace Microsoft Office is far from reality. Office is still the best-in-class productivity suite and Office 365 latest cloud bells and whistles. Unless the Government builds a large, self sustaining ecosystem around Open Source, it will not be able to replace any entrenched/established products like Office. I use unix/linux systems regularly and am still surprised by the gulf between these and Microsoft products. Sometime, I feel that Microsoft polishes their products to earn a living instead of free-to-use products.

from:
George

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 03:42 IST

The original article is clearly written by individuals who might have used traditional Microsoft Office products and clearly not familiar with the Cloud based SaaS offerings from Microsoft and its competitors. Because when the authors talk about periodic updates and costs associated with them it is clear that they do not understand how the cloud model works. It is disconcerting to note that the selection criteria if used and TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) considerations by the customer was not reviewed by the authors prior to writing the original article.

from:
Suresh Ramamoorthy

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 03:06 IST

Yes I would like my bank to run open source software - I would even want the robot doing my kidney operation running open source software. Open source almost always means free, but it seem you don't understand 'free', 'free' means freedom, its the freedom of people to modify and distribute a software as they please. In fact a lot of banks do run free software - the Linux kernel is a free software, Apache server is a free software. They have almost an impeccable code quality. We use free software without realizing they are there, because they have become part of our life.

from:
Debasish

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 01:13 IST

The authors of the article which is based upon technology do not seem to understand what they are writing about. Office 365 is OS independant and also agnostic to version updates at the desktop as this is cloud based. The authors need to tender an apology for their blatant mis understanding of the subject they are writing about. With their response they seem to be digging a deeper hole.

from:
Vivek

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 00:49 IST

This in response to the myths about Open Source Software in the posted comment by Dwaipayan Dighal above. Mr Dighal declares open source a "myth". I'd like to remind Mr Dighal that very likely the software he used to post the comment declaring open source a "myth" is itself open-source. Here's why: Firefox + Chrome browser family (both open source) dominate the browser market. The core of Apple Mac OS X (called "Darwin") is based on the open source BSD operating system. Why, even the Windows networking stack contains code from the BSD operating system (this is not illegal because BSD was released under a very permissive license which allows commercial companies to use their code without making their own code open). At the next level, most web servers (very likely the one on which this website is hosted) run Linux. The upshot is that far from being a "myth" open-source is here in a big way, and is being used in critical applications everywhere.

from:
Ahannaasmi

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 00:46 IST

The journalists involved should not be reporting on a matter they know nothing about. They clearly do not understand the meaning of "cloud storage." Since the software is in the cloud, it is generally understood that you can access it using a browser, which makes it compatible with any OS that can run a browser (including Linux).

from:
Varun H

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 00:28 IST

Sorry to hear Dighal about those comments. Everything has opensource origins from Andriod(from Linux) to MacOS(from BSD).Google servers, youtube servers and many routers run on open source. opensource is more than research, there are lot of products. Microsoft is not a Charity they have business goal for giving it for "free". I think Microsoft want to "lock in" the young generation with their product because when these young Engineers go to industry they will tend to use what they know.AICTE should define standards not dictate what software to use to access the cloud storage etc. It is upto the colleges what software or Operating system they want to use. Look Microsoft track record it is monopolistic and they paid huge fines in EU and anti trust cases in US.

from:
hari

Posted on: Apr 24, 2013 at 00:01 IST

There seems to be a lot of ignorance amongst some commentators here.
Firstly, cloud storage and SAAS etc. aren't as glamorous as people make them out to be. If you are putting all your information in the cloud, you have basically relinquished all expectations of privacy to it. You can also expect that the Govt. will then have access to this information. Therefore, if you write an essay critiquing the Indian Army or the Govt., you can expect a knock on the door from the Indian Gestapo.
Secondly, Free and Open Source Softwares are widely used for maintaining servers. FOSS has been proven to be more stable, secure and a better-long term option than any proprietary software, including Windows. Microsoft products contain US Govt. back-doors and are notorious for being bad at security. Finally, learning FOSS does not take away your Windows skills. It builds on them, and will undoubtedly teach people more about computing and networks. I fail to understand how this is a bad thing.

from:
Sam R

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 23:28 IST

As a software professional working in the same domain as cloud productivity tools in one of Microsoft's competitors, I think this article has been poorly researched and written with no understanding of Cloud or Office 365. The Hindu should retract this article immediately.

from:
Tilottama

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 23:26 IST

While MS Office is better than its other weak products - this act of establishing a lock in for a huge number of helpless student is a pitiful strategy and speaks of insecurity from open source. They anyway have a bad reputation of doing these kinds of things to win market and topple competition - won't work at this time.

from:
Albert Mendonca

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 23:18 IST

People here perhaps do not understand what is Free Software. A sad day when you loose your freedom willingly.

from:
Shiv Shankar Dayal

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 23:01 IST

To be honest, Microsoft office till date remains by far the best tool suite offered by any software vendor. The kind of features it has is unparalleled. This whole idea of open source is definitely good, but there is another aspect of maintainability, quality and return of investment. Microsoft office definitely scores in these respects. Also, the kind of platform Microsoft provides for programming using the Microsoft office API's is extraordinary. Open source is definitely good when it comes to some specific use cases, but not when it comes to catering to up gradable, accountable software's.

from:
Harish Viswanathan

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 22:34 IST

In today's world, something that is not adequately valued and traded/ shared/ passed around, it wont have a large scale impact on society. this applies to even cooking recipes (the much quoted analogy). Open source has its place in this world as it motivates students and gratifies the need to give but its like philanthropy - with limited scope in the big picture.

from:
Giridharan

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 22:31 IST

I completely agree with Akshayjit. I believe the original article, and also the response to Microsoft has been written just for the sake of argument, without any research on open source and its support model, what is cloud, so on and so forth. Please do due diligence and enough research before writing an article

from:
Mageshkumar

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 21:58 IST

Well said, "nothing comes free in life." I guess this is true for Office 365. So, what is the cost? Why cannot a student use OpenOffice? What is the cost of OpenOffice? This country is on sale and Indians are selling it.

from:
rameshwar

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 21:41 IST

It is abundantly clear for anyone with the knowledge of Cloud Services and SaaS model that the writers have no clue what they are talking about and did not do basic research before publishing this article. Their response to the points put forth by Microsoft proves this again. Their comments are more ambiguous than the weather predictions from our meteorological department. They say the support 'could be more expensive' if Office 365 is installed on Mac. Do they even know Office has had Mac versions for well over a decade? In fact, Office was created for Mac and not a PC. It was changed to work for PCs.

from:
Arun Aravindakshan

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 20:27 IST

Microsoft approach is to catch them when they are young by offering the office suite for free. But AICTE pushing specific software is illogical.

from:
Partha

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 20:01 IST

All in all i believe academic institutions should support linux and other open-source platform so the students have free hand in understanding the details and know how behind the scenes, MS would come in picture once they are in job.

from:
aditya

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 19:42 IST

I think the authors need to be more diligent and research properly before coming to conclusions. Office 365 is cloud based, i.e., you have to access it through a browser over the internet. There is no question about cost of updates as the update happens on the cloud and not on the client side (i.e., student`s computer). The software will not be installed on the computer, so the question of which OS is being used (Mac or Linux) does not arise. It will function equally well on all supporting browsers. Office 365 is an online office suite much like what Google (docs) offers.

from:
Pranith Kumar

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 18:13 IST

People still think of command line unix environment when we talk about open-source, and the reason is the lack of exposure to the developments that has happened in such applications. And steps like these by AICTE is partly responsible for this.
To quote the original article, "AICTE states that all institutes must compulsorily install and use Microsoft Office 365"! Students (at least those in technical education) should have the freedom to try any software they need and make a choice. Otherwise, we will still have a generation that thinks quality, usable open-source software is still a myth, and that banks and other secure servers do not run on open source software!

from:
George

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 17:23 IST

I think we are getting lost in what the primary problem with this arrangement is. I don't think it is to do with the fact that Office 365 is a good toolset or whether MS intends to do bait us into their product only to charge for the service later on. Most MS offerings are designed in a manner that they are tightly coupled with Windows, IE, Silverlight, ActiveX etc. Most of this is deliberate business decision rather than technical limitations. This is intended to dissuade Linux users and exclude them from utilizing systems to their full potential. So the concerns against this are very genuine, MS response totally skirts these concerns, they must address the concern if there is full feature parity between Linux and Windows users. I applaud Hindu for highlighting this issue.

from:
Pratap

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 15:01 IST

Open source software does have the all the features of a full commercial OS. The whole idea is to be open about the source. That allows future engineers to learn how a software works, interacts. It is free to be altered, modified to suit one's requirement. It is known that most of the servers of the web run on UNIX like OS. All this is supported by quality commercial software maintainence companies. Ubuntu does have a cloud based service with maintainence if required. Why the now ubiquitous android OS is based on LINUX. Almost all supercomputers run LINUX (all this verifiable with a simple google search)

I am a physician. I have used different flavours of LINUX over the past 12 years. Just to avoid constant security flaws in WINDOWS and repeated clean wipe of my HARD DRIVE. BSDs made me crazy. And I was not able to afford it.

There are no free lunches. especially in India. There is a catch here. We are yet to here of it.

from:
vikas

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 14:46 IST

Hi,
I welcome the comment nothing should come for free.
But only a free mind generates thoughts which transforms the world.
Ones creation and others followings-Would make no new inventions for tomorrow. It is always good to have challenges in what we do and what we think.

Any move to hamper the free thought may yield in good dead brains.

from:
Madan MOhan Reddy

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 14:40 IST

First, the cost aspect does arise.

For using cloud services, one must be connected to the internet at all times.

For multiple users to use these cloud services over a single internet connection, when loading heavy ppt files or heavy doc files, the service may falter.

So, a higher speed net service would be needed.

For offline copies of Office, this issue does not persist. And one can transfer files over the LAN.

Secondly, to make optimum usage of Live@Edu which is becoming Office 365 for Education, they recommend to have a copy of Windows. Thats another cost incurred.

from:
Vivek

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 14:32 IST

I am not sure whether Anuj Srivas and Vasudevan Mukunth actually read what cloud technology means before writing a whole article on it. Cloud technology in this context implies a SaaS ( Software as a Service) model in which no updation of software needs to be done at client's side (which are colleges in this context),i.e. microsoft will automatically update for all its customers. Secondly since it's delivered over the internet so whether it's run in windows/linus/Mac environment it doesn't make any difference; All you need is a supporting browser which is available for each of the OSes.
Thirdly,once again I don't think the authors have used office 365 used before writing a whole article on it because office 365's definition is well beyond being a 'word processing tool', and word processing part is just a smaller subset of it. From what I could gather it includes skydrive storage alongwith an email domain and the office productivity suite which all if offered for free is a good deal.

from:
Akshayjit

Posted on: Apr 23, 2013 at 09:52 IST

I wish ask the writer of story, will they would like their banks to run on open source software ?
Open source is a myth and nothing comes free in life. various initiative is there on open source platform for igniting student mind for researching creating better code. but please no research is required for a simple Office software which studnet will use for their classwork.
who control quality and bug testing for various open source office suite ..Hindu Newspaper ? please also note opne source dont mean FREE